The electronic industry is in a state of evolution spurred by the recent changes in technology which have allowed greater functionality in smaller devices. This has resulted in the explosion of new found uses for such small devices (e.g. medical, monitoring etc.), as well as greater functionality in increasingly smaller electronic devices.
The evolution has caused electronic devices to become an inseparable part of our society. Consumers are now buying and demanding electronic devices which are smaller, more powerful, and faster at unprecedented rates. These demands are constantly driving the electronic industry to exceed limitations which were previously considered unsurpassable.
One area ripe for improvement is how various electronic devices communicate with one another. Communication between various components in a system is typically accomplished using one or more buses. These buses are made up of parallel wires which provide the communication paths between the connected devices. These buses are used to send digital communication by transmitting a series of logical ones and zeros.
These buses have certain undesirable physical characteristics that must be alleviated using specialized circuits. In general, these specialized circuits limit the time periods during which information can be transmitted accurately. For example, one undesirable physical characteristic is the capacitance of each individual bus wire. Currently, driving circuits are used to charge and discharge the wiring capacitances of the individual bus lines between coupled devices. These driving circuits must also provide current where the bus lines are terminated away from the driver. As a result of their functionality, these drivers are inherently slower than the internal logic circuits residing in the devices.
Currently, these time limitations are alleviated by expanding the number of wires and physical size of the bus. Unfortunately, as electronic systems have been decreasing in size, the resulting packaging restraints now limit the ability to further increase the size of the bus to overcome the time limitations.
It would therefore, be a distinct advantage to have a method and apparatus that would alleviate the undesirable physical characteristics of the bus while maintaining desirable data transmission speeds. The present invention provides such a method and apparatus.